XVI
ON THE UPPER RIO GRANDE.
O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful and after that out of all whooping.
—Merchant of Venice iii, 2.
Off to Del Norte and Wagon Wheel Gap! That meant a long run. We might have gone afoot across the Cunningham Pass and down the Alpine fastness of the Rio Grande’s birthplace almost as speedily as the train would take us, back to Durango, over the heights and glories of Toltec, down the mazy labyrinth of the Whiplash, and across the sheep pastures of San Luis. But we were in no hurry, and by preparing had the jolliest time you can imagine the whole way. At Alamosa we bid a reluctant farewell to our three companions, the Artist, the Photographer and the Musician, who can no longer spare to us their society. But our prospective loneliness is mitigated by a new comer,—an old college friend. I shall introduce him to the reader as Chum, because that was the ordinary way in which we dispensed with his name.
“A merrier man
Within the limit of becoming mirth
I never spent an hour’s talk withal.”
Here, the good-bye and the welcome given in the same breath, we change our cars to a new train headed westward toward the upper course of the Rio Grande, with its farms and mines and medicinal springs.